


Vast Returns

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:27:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when you expect to die a hero, and you wake up instead?  With Miranda's unflagging help, Shep recovers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vast Returns

03:32ShepardCommander:   _What was the first pet you ever had?_  
03:40LawBringer:  _Shepard? You woke me up to ask me about pets?_  
03:41SC:  _You seem like a cat-person_.    
03:42LB:  _We had a dog.  A wolfhound.  Genetically engineered, of course._  
03:44SC:  _Did you like it?  Having a pet?_  
03:45LB:  _I don’t remember.  Well, that’s not true.  I remember the dog loved drinking coffee.  He would wait until my father wasn’t looking and stick his tongue in the mug.  Yes, I suppose I liked him._  
03:47SC:   _Since you’re up, I’m calling._  
03:47SC: [DISCONNECT]  
  
Miranda took a few seconds to answer.  While she waited, Shepard pushed back against the resolute avalanche of pillows piled behind her on the hospital bed.  What couldn’t be mended, it seemed, could be ameliorated by the addition of another pillow.  Shepard swore the nurses added them while she slept.

“I’m here,” Miranda’s voice crackled out of the comm., shoving out some of the stillness from the dark room.

“Thanks.  What time is it there?” Shepard closed her eyes, head black and heavy with…something good, chemical.  It was polite to ask, safe, and at least she hadn’t lost that much in the fall.  She remembered cordiality, to open with the time and the weather and not, as she had wanted, by asking the things she’d woken up with.  Had Miranda ever sweated in that suit, and where, and if there were fine hairs in the small of her back?  And, good chemicals notwithstanding, Miranda had to be a cat person.

“Shepard, I’m six blocks away,” Miranda said, shifting in bed, and over the comm. Shepard heard the distant sheets bustling, followed by a brief yawn.

“Right,” She replied, and nodded to the empty room.  Six blocks, not the other side of the world, or the galaxy, like some turians she could name.  “I just…miss my fish, if you can believe it.”

“You’re on some decent medication if that’s the only thing you miss.”  Miranda yawned again, filling Shepard’s room, but mostly her mind, with a ghosting image of dark hair and white linen.  Maybe a tank top.  After a moment she continued, “I miss long showers.  And privacy.”

“Gotcha.  I’ll see what I can do about that.”  With whatever flagging memory she had for the names of those in charge now, Shepard made a mental note to inquire about the privacy, if not the shower.  

“While I appreciate the thought, it’s not really up to you.”

Shepard wanted to shake her head, to clear the obstacles and smooth the path, or rather she had wanted to.  Now, though, she looked at the window and hoped Miranda would be able to go back to sleep.  The curtains were drawn, but out there, in the grey and black smudges of life beyond the glass, were the unabashed remains of something that had been up to her.  They were there, and even shut up in a hospital Shepard could smell it.  Char and sweat and oil like a shroud on the city.    
  
All the cities, probably.    
  
She glanced at her lap and moved a scarred hand over the sheet there.  
  
“Laps need cats, you know,” Shepard murmured.  It would be a weight she could feel now, even though she shouldn’t have been able to.  After another invisible yawn, Miranda’s voice dragged through Shepard’s distraction.  
  
“Go back to sleep, Shepard,” she said, and it was almost tangible the way the words hovered like a finger poised to hang up the call.  “I’ll come by in a few days to check on you.”  
  
“Hey, Miranda.  Thanks for the chair.” If she could push that finger away, keep some little spark of kinship alive in her hospital room, Shepard was intent on doing so.  She reached out and stroked the arm of the wheelchair.  “I don’t remember if I said that last time.”  
  
“You didn’t.  And you’re welcome.”  This time she didn’t have to prod.  Shepard heard Miranda padding through her room, sound catching against tile, and there was a squeal of pipes as she filled a glass.  “With the way we – Cerberus - rebuilt you the first time, the chair will be obsolete by the time you figure out all the features.  You’ll be on your feet soon enough.”  
  
And if she didn’t want to be, on her feet, well that was going to have be all right, too.  
  
“Wait. I had something else to ask.” And this she’d actually been working toward for days, when the meds let her.  “Have you heard from Oriana?”  
  
“Yes, as a matter of fact.  She’s with her family at a refugee center in Nos Astra.”    
In her room, Shepard imagined Miranda’s true smile, the don’t-get-used-to-it variety she’d shared only a few times, and the self-conscious drift of fingertips at her throat.  
  
“Good.  That’s …I bet she’s already hacking the local wire.  Feeding you intel.  Am I right?” Shepard asked.  Child’s play for a child like no other.  Maybe one other.  Shepard had known kids like Orri all her life: Sweet, tough, adaptable. Though, on Earth they’d been far dirtier than Miranda’s sister would likely ever be.  
  
“Something like that.  I was so relieved I couldn’t be angry,” Miranda said.  Shepard heard her take a sip, and then the bare clink of the glass on the counter.  “And, thanks, Shepard.”  
  
“I-”  
  
“Thank you for asking.  For always asking.”  
  
Shepard took a deep breath, wincing at the stitched places that rioted inside her every time she made the mistake; breathing when she shouldn’t, or making it a gesture too difficult for this body the way it hadn’t been for the last.  She pulled the wheelchair close to the bed.  
  
“Well, I should let you get some sleep,” Shepard said, blinking down at the omni-tool’s glow.    
  
“Do the same, please,” came Miranda’s prickly voice.  
  
“No promises.”  She smiled, mind already poking through her med-haze and legs thrumming under the blanket.  “Good night and good morning, Miranda.”  
  
They flashed off simultaneously and Shepard was left alone again, quiet, though the grey atmosphere outside her curtains had shifted enough for weak, yellow light to aid in what she’d planned next.  
  
In the bedside table she’d stored the only regulation fatigues they’d been able to scrounge for her, along with a heavy canvas coat, and these she lifted from the drawer with something like delight.  Pushing back the scratchy blanket, Shepard dressed herself as quickly as her limp collection of bone and skin would allow, taking far too long to wrestle her legs and hips into the pants, and sweating by the end of it.  She stuffed her feet, warm in English wool socks, into a pair of boots, hung the jacket on the back of the wheelchair, and turned it on.  
  
All the other chairs and scooters had required her to lever herself over the arms and she hadn’t been strong enough for any of them.   _You know, it’s okay to lean_ , Garrus had said once, low enough that she wasn’t sure he meant it.  Or maybe she’d said it to him.  Either way, there had been blood enough for it to seem true.  
  
Because moving from the bed meant leaning and heaving and flattening her lips for well-meaning strangers. So Shepard had stayed put.  She’d stayed in bed when Cortez begged her to get out for a day (and kept asking long after he should’ve stopped). She’d stayed in bed at first when the Major told her that the QEC was back online.  She’d stayed still, dreaming darkly through her meds, and let herself be unmoved for all the times since the fall that she’d given in, been handled, jostled and groomed for the Council’s mandated photo-ops.  
  
Shepard had liked being still, and her body put up no argument.  
  
Miranda’s chair whirred softly and lifted itself up against the bed, adjacent arm sliding down to allow access, and for maybe the third time since the last surgery, since starting PT, since she’d wiggled her toes for no one but herself …Shepard was going to leave the goddamn hospital on her own.   
   
Only this time she was smiling when she scooted across her musty sheets and seated herself in the chair.   
   
Outside, past the salarian nurses who smoked in the broken doorway, hunching their shoulders away from London’s drizzle, Shepard urged her chair East toward the FOB.  They nodded down at her, but as she looked back it was clear she wasn’t  _Shepard_  to them, and like being still, she held that feeling pretty dearly.   
   
The chair rolled on.  It didn’t take much, just a delicate sweep of her finger across the control pad, and she was humming over scarred pavements like she’d always done this.  Shepard didn’t look down to see how the cushioned wheels took the giant gaps, she just rolled and sucked her cheek when the chair bounced a jolt of lighting into her hips.  The hospital, and its huge number of allied wounded, sat at the edge of one of London’s luckier districts, with most buildings safe if not whole.  There were Reapers, too, but these were black, distant carrion in the perpetual haze.  
  
And it stank.  
   
Like cracking open a rotten thresher egg in the heat of summer.  Synthetic death had a smell, oil as much as blood, and the charred reminder of it never seemed to empty from the city. Not when it rained, which it did in thick, dun-colored sheets, and not when the wind blew, which was rare.  
  
Shepard swung her head to the dual salutes of a cracked turian soldier and his asari partner as they escorted a small group of kids into the tented school sprawling across the park.  She’d seen it from her window, diagonal to the hospital.  Now, down in the street, their little faces weren’t even shell-shocked any more, mostly they just yawned and shuffled past the tentflap.  Shepard moved on, and the city woke up slowly around her, yellow snaking across grey as the sun touched the edges of everything.  
  
Rolling up to the tenth streetcorner she stopped at a kiosk that bustled with soldiers and aid-workers despite its broken terminals. She picked up a bottle of water and spied a small, spotty pear.  
  
“Have it with my compliments, Commander,” said the heavy-faced battleaxe behind the counter, pitching the fruit easily into Shepard’s hands.  
  
“You’ll take my credits one day, Sera,” she replied, turning the pear over with a sigh.  
  
“Ayuh.  Just not today.” Sera winked, dark eyes flashing, and turned to the two krogan who’d stopped poking through her display of tourist t-shirts to stare at Shepard.  But she just backed the chair out of the kiosk’s shadow and swung it East again.  As the hum gathered beneath her thighs, impressive mechanics for such a small chair, Shepard heard Sera’s console boost a little louder, crackling, and the woman began to sing over the grunts of krogan and humans demanding one thing or another.   _Oh lil Liza…lil Liza Jane._  As she had done for weeks, with that same gravelly timbre, every time Shepard had passed her store.  
  
Shepard smiled down at her lap, at the pear cradled there.   _Come my love an’ live with me, I will take good care of thee, lil Liza Jane Jane, lil Liza_ … and on, until Sera’s voice was swallowed by the grind of London’s waking.  
   
An hour later she’d eaten the fruit, every part but the stem, downed the water, and forgotten that she’d smiled at all as she neared the FOB.   
  
Major Coats met her at the entrance, nothing more than a rough hole edged in torn brick, and tried to apologize for the state of things.  Shepard saluted him, shook his hand, and muttered dryly through her sideways smile about what a disgrace he was to his uniform.  As if he hadn’t held this place together. As if hadn’t held the line down in the shit as much as he had in the clock tower. As if.  
  
“If you want to get up to the QEC I can-” he started, quick eyes assessing her chair, and then her face.  Shepard didn’t let him.  
  
“No need, Major.  I’ll go around the outside,” she said, and he followed her to the rubble-slide swooping to the upper floor.  Shepard knocked the lever beside her left arm and the secondary system kicked on.  As Coats came alongside her, the chair tucked its wheels, hovering in a filmy cloud of exhaust and debris, and Shepard drove it up and over the rubble.  
  
At the second floor, she resumed rolling with a hiss of mechanized air as Coats got the technician out of his chair to man the comm.  Shepard was sweating.  It stuttered along the length of her spine, seeping into the red surgical seams there, and she thought again of Miranda’s suit.   
   
“SSV Normandy if you would, Specialist,” Coats ordered.  Arms folded, he scanned the console and said, “They’re considerably closer than the last time we hailed them.  Good on Moreau, I suppose. It shouldn’t take as long.”  
  
The tech pulled up his display when it pinged, and Shepard wrenched her jacket off.   
   
“Ready for you, Commander.”  
  
Her fingers were digging into the corners of her eyes, rubbing away the stormfront of a headache gathering just behind them, and Shepard blinked the bleariness off just in time to see Joker snap into the grid over the holopad.  Blue and yellow and such a relief.  
  
“Commander!” He beamed at her and Shepard felt every molecule of the distance wedged between herself and her home. Not as bad as the first time she’d seen them, but it still made her heart flip.   
  
They were coming, though.    
  
She was about to respond, opening her mouth to do more than smile back at just the sight of him, but Joker cut her off.  “Hey, there’s literally a ship full of people who want to talk to you.”  
   
She stopped herself from rubbing her forehead.    
  
“Good to know,” Shepard said, exhaling.  “I can’t get to-”  
   
“We should be hitting Sol in about two weeks,” Joker said, shoulders rocking as he made adjustments.  Shepard watched his bright eyes flick to something off-screen, to the empty seat most likely, before going on.  “And Daniels is running some crazy shit down in-”  
  
“Joker.”  She swallowed, pain throbbing across the back of her head.  This would be an expensive call to make if she ended up blowing everyone off.  Shepard leaned forward.  “Can I just …talk to Garrus?”  
  
“Aye aye, Commander,” Joker replied, sweeping his cap off and re-settling it.  She’d thought he looked okay, energized and focused, but she’d been wrong.  He saluted her.  “Good to see you again.”  
  
The holopad fritzed, grid going dark for a moment before sparking up again.  Shepard watched Coats’ face as he hovered on the console.   
   
Absently, she thought of EDI’s body, probably they’d put her in the AI core again, traveling so long and hard to get somewhere she’d never been. Back to square one.  
  
“Shepard.  What time is it there?” A gritty voice, light for its years, cut through Shepard’s distraction.  
  
When she looked up, Garrus was on the holopad stretching his neck and peering at her.  Two weeks and she could finally bang her fist on the front of that armor, right over the massive crack she could still see, and tell him to never do that again. She’d have to, because he would say it first if she gave him the chance.  Harbinger had dinged his armor, and looking at him through the holopad Shepard wasn’t sure if Garrus was wearing that crack out of pride or exhaustion.  
  
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Shepard said, face splitting into a wide grin, splitting cuts across her lip, too. Garrus yawned and Shepard did the same.  Apparently the rule was not human-specific.   
   
She leaned back in the wheelchair, palms tapping the arms, and met his steady gaze  “It doesn’t matter.  Could be oh-six or midnight.”  
  
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” Garrus asked, a single talon scritching along his jaw.  
  
“Did I ever?”  
  
“Once or twice, when no one was looking,” he replied. They’d sleep when they were dead, as the saying went. But then they’d woken.  Both of them.  Shepard didn’t remember feeling lucky for herself, but she’d damn sure thanked the spirits for Garrus and his goddamned rocket.  While she watched the holo, he slid his visor off and scratched behind his fringe.  “Hey, now’s your chance so take your … sleep where you can get it.” 

That he’d paused, and bit back  _beauty sleep,_  did not escape her.  
  
“How are you holding up?” She asked, pulling her jacket back over her shoulders.  Just that movement made her head swim, and an angry throbbing snaked around her back.  Garrus cleared his throat and Shepard scoffed.

 “What?”  
  
“Oh, I’m just thinking about our life spans, turians and humans,” he said, slipping the visor back into place.  She liked the sudden slash of blue, so familiar.  He crossed his arms, voice low and teasing.  “Just wondering if I’ll live to see the day when you stop checking me for bumps and scratches.”  
  
Shepard winced.  He didn’t have to know it wasn’t for the words.  
  
“Give me a break, I have nothing left to worry about any more.”  She let her hands lay open in her lap, chuckling suddenly though it made her lungs burn.  “Tag, you’re it, buddy.”  
  
His fringe swung when he shook his head.  
  
“I’m fine.  Nothing that finally seeing a friendly star system won’t cure.”  
  
“Didn’t you hear?  We’re all friends now,” she said, leaning into her hand.  Shepard’s eyes drifted shut for a second, remembering this very spot and how he’d made her promise.  She’d woken up having never once dreamed of the bar. Shepard pointed lazily at Garrus through the holopod. “You owe me a drink.”  
  
“We …I owe you a lot more than that.”  His voice broke, or maybe it was the connection, and she nodded.  Garrus stepped closer, his features softening in the distortion at the blue edge of the grid, and there was no mistaking an order when she heard one. “Call back soon, Shepard.  Normandy out.”  
  
Two weeks.  She stared at the blank holopad.  
  
The QEC went quiet and Shepard nodded at the technician before swinging the chair away in a tight circle.  She pushed toward the FOB’s outer wall, to the gaping hole that was like a wound filling up with bright, grey light, and stopped at the edge of the rubble-slide.  As her eyes focused and drifted across the city, Shepard breathed in the chill.  A few blocks away, a small group of salarians in heavy coats were arguing with the soldiers at the FOB blockade, their high voices ricocheting upward.  
  
An hour of pain crawled out ahead of her as she prepped, mentally, to roll back to the hospital, all that broken concrete and soot-streaked cars to weave through, and not one inch of it felt necessary.  Shepard turned off the chair and it sighed underneath her.  
  
 _It’s okay to lean._  
   
She didn’t know she wanted the tea until Coats put the chipped mug in her hand.  Shepard thanked him, wondering just how long she’d been sitting in front of the quiet panorama before he’d brewed the cup for her.  

Measuring time had definitely lost its appeal.   
   
There had been a wolfhound who loved coffee and Miranda had liked him, even if she seemed like a cat person.  Pain sketched from temple to temple, tripped from her spine to hip and back again like an interrupted circuit.  Shepard looked down at the dark liquid in her mug, figuring it was close enough, and imagined a scruffy muzzle slurping up her tea.  
  
She sipped with careful lips.  
   
The mug didn’t shake in her wasted fingers, and she was as grateful as she was supposed to be for something like that.  
  
“Major, can you call Cortez for me?”  
  
“Right away, mum.”  
  
Shepard hurt.  It wasn’t difficult to give up being a hero about it.


End file.
